SAP ERP Central Component, popularly known as SAP ECC, is soon reaching end-of-support. In the coming five years, SAP will encourage all its ECC customers to move to their fourth generation ERP – S/4HANA.
S/4 HANA will become the flagship offering for enterprise resource planning. This has generated many conversations regarding new features, the business benefits of migrating from SAP ECC to S/4 HANA, and the technical roadmap that can ensure a smooth transition.
Let’s first look at some of the key differences between SAP ECC and S/4 HANA to understand the business benefits that S/4 HANA can bring to SAP’s ERP customer base.
Key differences between SAP ECC and S/4 HANA
ECC’s Modular Structure
SAP ECC consists of many separate modules that an organization can use to streamline operations across business areas like Finance, Logistics, HR, Product Planning, and Customer Service.
The organization can pick-and-choose the modules they would like to use. But this flexibility also brings in complexities into the system. Each module requires configuration and any change in one module can have repercussions on the others. This means that organizations need to carefully consider the effects of upgrades or customizations on each separate module.
S/4 HANA, on the other hand, has brought in many simplifications – both to the IT landscape as well as to data structures. It is an intelligent ERP that reduces complexity and helps organizations to run their operations faster and more efficiently. S/4 HANA’s product strategy recognizes that customers entering new markets or moving to new business processes will need to add new functionality fast. This flexibility to add quickly add extensions is made possible with S/4 HANA’s Cloud Platform. S/4 HANA’s current and future roadmap includes addition of all ECC (Enterprise Central Component) functions which includes APO, CRM, SRM, EWM, and TM.
S/4 HANA’s In-Memory Computing Capabilities
While SAP ECC can run on the third-party databases such as the Oracle DB, or IBM DB2, S/4 HANA only runs on the SAP HANA database.
The HANA database has powerful in-memory capabilities that provide a solid foundation for S/4 HANA’s ERP functionality. It allows data to remain in the main RAM, which ensures the system can read data much faster than would be possible with other types of databases, which need to fetch data from the hard disk to read.
Tables are column-based and only affected columns are read, which results in faster access to the required data. It allows parallel processing of different columns and also achieves better compression.
The HANA database can provide real-time reporting and predictive analysis as Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) can happen in the same system.
Lastly, it does not have aggregates, index, or history tables. Aggregates are created on-the-fly in the HANA database, based on line item tables.
S/4 HANA provides a Single Source of Truth in the Universal Journal
The Universal Journal or ACDOCA is a single line item table that combines the data structures of FI, AA, CO, CO-PA, and ML. This simplifies the data structures since data needs to be inserted into only a single table instead of several tables.
MATDOC is a new line item introduced in SAP S/4HANA for inventory management. It helps reduce approximately 26 tables as compared to tables present in SAP ECC.
Simplifications in S/4 HANA
The simplifications brought in by S/4 HANA include some big-impact changes like those described above in terms of simplified table and data structures. Another type of simplification is the removal of outdated or non-essential functionalities. New, improved functionality has been introduced in its place.
You can find details of all the simplifications on the SAP Help Portal by clicking here.
As part of S/4 HANA’s strategy towards reducing complexity, SAP has designed S/4 HANA Cloud edition to keep core development at a minimum and provide non-core customizations via external applications. This makes adoption of new functionality non-disruptive.
Standard integrations are available for plugging in other cloud solutions like SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP Ariba, IBP, C4C, Commerce, etc., effectively reducing the complexity of the IT landscape.
Added to this, the HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) provides the ability to enhance S/4HANA functionality with extensions or to build new applications. These guided customizations include services to provide integration, UI/UX, IoT, Analytics and Database-level services. This simplified yet effective mix of technologies that can be woven into SAP S/4 HANA makes life easy for customers!
Innovative Front-end using Fiori Apps
S/4 HANA harnesses SAP Fiori at its front-end. This provides powerful personalization options for front-end users and delivers a superior user experience.
For example, Fiori Lighthouse scenarios provide an overview screen with real-time reports.
Another interesting Fiori app is Copilot, a digital assistant that is also available as a mobile app and that many consider to be a game-changing feature in S/4 HANA.
For software as vast and comprehensive as S/4 HANA, the aspects we have described above are just the tip of the iceberg! You can read many more of the changes brought by S/4 HANA on the SAP portal.
The Top 5 Business Benefits of Migrating from ECC to S/4 HANA
Changes brought by S/4 HANA will benefit organizations in many different ways. Let’s look at some of the important ones:
- S/4 HANA is reinventing business processes by driving them in real-time. By eliminating non-essential or redundant data, aggregates and tables, S/4 is impacting the speed, and agility of business operations positively.
- S/4 HANA is simplifying the entire IT landscape and achieving reductions in the overall data footprint of the organization, making business processes and operations leaner, agile, and more efficient.
- Since S/4 HANA enables users to work on large datasets in one system, it saves significant hardware costs, operational costs, not to mention time. This delivers a reduced total cost of ownership, which is very good news for organizations considering early migration to S/4 HANA.
- S/4 HANA provides stakeholders and teams with live business data and real-time embedded analytics. This can help improve business planning, execution, and reporting generation.
- Real-time insights from the digital core of S/4 HANA enable faster decision making. This can help speed up the way businesses react to dynamic market conditions and respond to competition. Ultimately, this helps in improving revenue and profits.
- SAP’s ongoing focus on customer experience (CX) can be clearly seen in S/4 HANA as it provides simplifications at several levels and provides end-to-end scenarios for the customer with its robust digital core. A better CX makes this the intelligent, next-gen platform.
Are you ready to make the move from ECC to S/4 HANA?
Sapours has the expertise to smoothen your transition with ready-to-use data services templates for S/4 Hana. Our innovative approach and in-depth understanding of changes in data, objects, and tables concerning S/4 Hana reduces the production downtime and achieves system consolidation and migration at one go.
Mitigate your ECC-to-S/4HANA risks by choosing Sapours as your partner in the ECC to S/4 HANA conversion.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation call.
Author Details –
Pravin Malve.
Delivery Lead S4 HANA
Experienced Lead Consultant with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and Service Industry. Skilled Business Process, SAP Production planning, Quality Management, SAP implementation, HANA implementation, Requirements Analysis and Pre-sales.
